What Does Neuroethics Have to Say about the Problem of Dual Use?

Abstract

This chapter sketches the areas of interest and methods used by neuroethicists to ask what they have had to say about the problem of dual use: the fact that advances in benignly intended civil neuroscience could produce materials, knowledge and technologies that might then be used for hostile purposes by others. Of course, it should be understood from the start that this is no small problem, as has been made abundantly clear, for example, in the Lemon-Relman report of the US National Academies in 2006, which, in its second recommendation, stated that it was necessary to ‘[a]dopt a broadened awareness of threats beyond the classical “select agents” and other pathogenic organisms and toxins, so as to include, for example, approaches for disrupting host homeostatic and defence systems and for creating synthetic organisms’.4